Microbial Intelligence
Hey readers,
Back from Biocontrol & Biostimulants LATAM, and this is the edition I promised you from the conference.
I picked three talks that stuck with me.
Starting with Mark Trimmer, and the part of his talk where he described the characteristics of the biologicals companies that will come out ahead in such a volatile market.
Adailson Feitoza shared his work on how Brazil's Caatinga can act as a source of strains that help crops through drought.
And Jeferson Peres walked through what the Brazilian market actually looks like and the main challenges holding adoption back.
Let's start.
UNDER THE LENS
An effective product opens the door, but adoption is another story
At Biocontrol & Biostimulants LATAM 2026, Mark Trimmer, founding partner and president of DunhamTrimmer, shared his perspective on where the biologicals industry stands today and where it is heading in the coming years.
Rather than reviewing every trend he presented, I want to focus on the message that stayed with me after his talk.
Which biologicals companies will stand out in an increasingly volatile market?
According to Trimmer, not necessarily those with the most biologically effective product, but those that know how to bring that product successfully to market.
The companies that truly understand growers: what challenges they face, how they make decisions, and how they already farm. The ones that build their strategy around sustainable profitability rather than growth as an end in itself.
The companies that develop products that are not only scientifically robust, but also consistent under real field conditions, simple to integrate into existing farming practices, and capable of delivering reliable performance season after season.
Adoption happens when innovation fits naturally into a grower's operation, not when it asks them to completely change the way they farm. Scientific innovation opens the door, yes, but strategy and execution determine whether a product ever reaches its potential in the marketplace.
This shift in perspective may be one of the greatest challenges (and one of the greatest opportunities) for the biologicals industry over the next decade.
THE STRAIN
Extreme ecosystems as the next microbial discovery platform for biologicals
Brazil's Caatinga is hot, dry and difficult to live in. But those conditions are exactly what make its microorganisms interesting.
At the conference, Adailson Feitoza de Jesus Santos showed how the Caatinga can work as a natural laboratory for microbial discovery. Low rainfall and high temperatures put strong selective pressure on microbial communities, favoring microorganisms with traits that help them survive under stress.
He and his team are looking at how those traits can be useful in agriculture.The process starts with expeditions into the Caatinga. Microorganisms are collected into a microbial bank, screened for stress tolerance and useful functions, analyzed through genomics and bioinformatics, and the strongest candidates move into greenhouse and field testing, with product development at the end of the pipeline.
One of those candidates is Bacillus subtilis BSS.2162, isolated from the rhizosphere of Pilosocereus gounellei, a cactus native to the Caatinga. The strain carries genetic traits associated with tolerance to abiotic stress and plant growth promotion. In greenhouse tests, maize inoculated with BSS.2162 under severe water restriction performed significantly better than the control, with improvements ranging from 48 to 306 percent across the parameters evaluated (3 Biotech, January 2026).
Extreme environments have already put microbes through years of natural selection, and some of those adaptations are showing potential for use in agriculture.
INDUSTRY
The technology is there, but there is still a gap in achieving consistent field results
Jeferson Peres de Oliveira, a bioinputs strategist in Brazil, framed the problem this way at the event: the central issue is no longer the technology itself, but how it is adopted in the field.
Brazil is not short of biological products. There are plenty of registered ones. The challenge now is turning that abundance into technical confidence and results growers can rely on.
He pointed to three bottlenecks that hold adoption back.
The first is technical: poor product positioning, incorrect timing or application methods, incompatibility with chemical crop protection, and local soil and climate conditions can all affect performance. Biologicals do not operate in isolation. They are part of a biological system.
The second is educational: insufficient technical training in the field, oversimplified commercial communication, lack of continuous technology transfer.
The third is strategic: limited post-sale support, unclear indicators of success and unrealistic expectations of fully replacing chemical products.
Together, these bottlenecks make a biological product hard to position correctly, and they slow its adoption in the field.
Peres closed on the same point: “the future of biologicals in Latin America depends less on new registrations and more on technical qualification, continuous education and real strategies for adoption in the field”.
That is Edition # 8 of Microbial Intelligence. If you found this useful, please forward it to one person in your network who would benefit, that is how we grow this community.
See you next week. 🌱